Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher wins Dylan Thomas prize with ‘audacious’ novel The Coin

A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Palestinian journalist Yasmin Zaher took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut novel The Coin. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

The Coin, chosen in a unanimous decision by judges, “is a borderless novel, tackling trauma and grief with bold and poetic moments of quirkiness and humour”, said writer and judging chair Namita Gokhale. “It fizzes with electric energy”, with Zaher bringing “complexity and intensity to the page through her elegantly concise writing”.

Born in 1991 in Jerusalem, Zaher studied biomedical engineering at Yale University and creative writing at the New School, where she was advised by the novelist Katie Kitamura.

Kitamura described The Coin as a “brilliant, audacious, powerhouse of a novel. A story of obsession and appetite, politics and class, it is deliciously unruly. An exceptional debut by an outrageous new talent.”

The novel follows a wealthy Palestinian woman as she tries to set down roots in New York, teaching in a school for underprivileged boys. However, she begins to feel stifled in the US, and develops an obsession with cleanliness and purity.

In an interview last July, Zaher said that she had “very mixed feelings” about her novel coming out at this time. “Publishing a novel is a dream come true for me, but the joy is muted by grief. Deep inside, I also know that current events are driving some of the interest in the book, and I feel very uncomfortable with that, because I never considered myself as speaking in the name of my people.

“But I tell myself that identity is not pure, that life is messy, and, maybe most importantly, that literature is at its best when it resists the boxes.”

Other writers shortlisted for this year’s prize were Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt, Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson and Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams.

Alongside Gokhale on the judging panel were the writer Jan Carson, poet Mary Jean Chan, critic Max Liu and academic Daniel Williams.

Previous winners of the prize, launched in 2006, include Max Porter, Bryan Washington and Patricia Lockwood. Last year, Caleb Azumah Nelson won the award for his novel Small Worlds.

“Zaher is an extraordinary winner to mark 20 years of this vital prize,” said Gokhale.